Gesture–speech integration in children with specific language impairment

Abstract

Background Previous research suggests that speakers are especially likely to produce manual communicative gestures when they have relative ease in thinking about the spatial elements of what they are describing, paired with relative difficulty organizing those elements into appropriate spoken language. Children with specific language impairment (SLI) exhibit poor expressive language abilities together with within-normal-range nonverbal IQs. Aims This study investigated whether weak spoken language abilities in children with SLI influence their reliance on gestures to express information. We hypothesized that these children would rely on communicative gestures to express information more often than their age-matched typically developing (TD) peers, and that they would sometimes express information in gestures that they do not express in the accompanying speech. Methods & Procedures Participants were 15 children with SLI (aged 5;6–10;0) and 18 age-matched TD controls. Children viewed a wordless cartoon and retold the story to a listener unfamiliar with the story. Children's gestures were identified and coded for meaning using a previously established system. Speech–gesture combinations were coded as redundant if the information conveyed in speech and gesture was the same, and non-redundant if the information conveyed in speech was different from the information conveyed in gesture. Outcomes & Results Children with SLI produced more gestures than children in the TD group; however, the likelihood that speech–gesture combinations were non-redundant did not differ significantly across the SLI and TD groups. In both groups, younger children were significantly more likely to produce non-redundant speech–gesture combinations than older children. Conclusions & Implications The gesture–speech integration system functions similarly in children with SLI and TD, but children with SLI rely more on gesture to help formulate, conceptualize or express the messages they want to convey. This provides motivation for future research examining whether interventions focusing on increasing manual gesture use facilitate language and communication in children with SLI.

Gesture Production in Language Impairment: It's Quality, Not Quantity, That Matters

“…On the one hand, Mainela-Arnold et al (2014) found no differences between children with LI and TD children in the number of redundant or extending gestures they produced during narrative monologue. This suggests children with LI were predominantly using gesture to reinforce the spoken utterance rather than to express additional information.…”

“…They concluded that children with LI use gesture to compensate for language deficits. Mainela-Arnold, Alibali, Hostetter, and Evans (2014) similarly found that during a story retelling task, children with LI gestured more frequently than TD peers. Consistent with this, Lavelli, Barachetti, and Florit (2015) reported children with LI gesture more frequently than age-matched TD peers, but at a similar rate to language-matched children.…”

“…A critical difference between studies was the choice of task; Mainela-Arnold et al (2014) asked children to narrate a wordless cartoon, whereas Evans et al (2001) used a Piagetian conservation task. The narrative task used by Mainela-Arnold et al (2014) is arguably conceptually easier for children to complete than the conservation task, because they have pictures available to scaffold their language. As such, the narrative task may not have placed sufficiently high cognitive demands on the children, reducing their need to use gesture to aid their communication.…”

“…However, other studies of gesture have used similar narrative tasks and have reported that children with LI produce more extending gestures than their TD peers (Blake et al, 2008;Iverson & Braddock, 2011). Mainela-Arnold et al (2014) and Blake et al (2008) both used narrative recall tasks, but the Mainela-Arnold et al (2014) stimuli were nonverbal and only lasted for 90 s, and children watched this cartoon twice. In contrast, Blake et al (2008) used a longer cartoon that had a verbal element and was only shown once, increasing working memory demands.…”

Gestural abilities of children with specific language impairment

“…This is supported by Mainela‐Arnold et al . () who also found that children with SLI gestured more frequently than TD peers. On the other hand, some studies have found that children with SLI do not gesture more frequently than TD children (Evans et al .…”